How hitting the snooze button can ruin your day

Getting out of bed when your alarm goes off can be one of the hardest parts of our day, especially in winter.

So many of us regularly reach for the snooze button in an attempt to savour those last precious minutes of rest before a busy day begins.

However, it's been suggested that this could be detrimental to our health, and make us feel more tired than if we'd gotten up straight away.

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Choosing to snooze makes your body release hormones designed to send you into a deep sleep, report experts at Sleep Clinic Services.

The result is what's known as "sleep inertia", which might be more commonly known as the groggy feeling we experience when we've slept too long, or just woken up from a nap.

"The start of the sleep cycle is not a good time for being jolted awake by your alarm again," the Sleep Clinic Services team told The Sun.

"In fact, you'll end up feeling like you've had a really bad night's sleep, even though you slept like a baby," they added.

Sleep inertia can last well into your day and impairs your cognitive functioning, even if you feel like you're fully awake.

"It tends to put people off on the back foot for the day," said Sleep Health Foundation psychologist Moira Junge.

"You're much more likely to feel better [if you get out of bed from that first alarm] than having a snooze for another nine minutes," she told Coach.

If you do struggle with getting and staying out of bed, she suggests time-honoured tricks like "a bit of exercise", a warm shower, or exposure to natural light — a sign to your body’s internal clock that it’s daytime now.

Or, rather than waking up just to go back to sleep again, it's recommended that avid snoozers simply set their alarms ten minutes later, and get up as soon as it goes off.